Wa Is Not Harmony

The book begins with the most famous face in Japan, Prince Shōtoku on the ten-thousand-yen note: a face everyone knew, and that was no one. From the sound that Chinese envoys heard as "Wa," through Queen Himiko, the Seventeen-Article Constitution, the long peace of Edo, the Meiji Restoration and the postwar decades, to the present, it follows the traces of wa as it transforms, and separates it from Daiwa, the "Great Wa": the single order that speaks in the name of wa. What has been called the air and peer pressure is not wa.

Wa (和) is not mass conformity itself. I place wa as the invisible action and working that gives rise to mass conformity, and the two realms, so easily confused, must be kept clearly apart in thought. Nor is it the government, society, or any particular leader or group that is needed for wa to produce mass conformity. Wa transforms by its own will, and we are subject at every moment to the effects of that change. So it is impossible for human beings to correct or alter wa on purpose. This recognition is the root of understanding wa, and it is the invisible force that produces mass conformity.

In plain terms, it is a taboo against making waves, and at the level of the village community, a taboo against breaking the norm. Because Zhu Xi learning brings in the basic thought of absolute loyalty to superiors, the meaning changes a good deal. It turns into the thought of devoting oneself to loyalty to parents, siblings and those of high social standing in order to preserve the community. Zhu Xi's loyalty shifts into a virtue of putting the interest of others and the community first, even at the cost of killing the self, so for the lofty aim of not disturbing wa, killing oneself becomes necessary. This shows that wa does not stand for an actual "visible community" like a village but for an "invisible communal norm." It has no substance, so it changes with each age. This is the root of understanding wa.

The reason is that the meaning of "one" changes with the age. In modern state formation, the state and the people are united as "one" into an enormous sphere, but before the modern age that notion was impossible. And whenever a sphere of "one" is set, a group is bound to be excluded. In today's world people try to understand these things within a modern, Western framework, but in Japan this structure involves wa as an "invisible communal norm." And wa is one, and at the same time it is tied to "being the same as everyone." This is why Japan did not produce individualism even after the modern age, and why it was understood internationally as totalitarian. It is not that the Japanese have a national trait with a problem in asserting the individual. It is a ground that cannot be seen unless one decodes the transformation of wa.

In other words, a Japanese decision is not made by an individual's subjective will but by a non-subjective will called wa. The problem of "individualism and totalitarianism," as nearly every Japanese discusses it, is that this is entirely invisible to them. Unless it is seen, every argument is turned upside down.

Let us start with the basics. The textual origin of the concept of wa is the first article of the Seventeen-Article Constitution laid down by Shotoku Taishi (574–622). According to the Nihon Shoki, completed in 720, Japan's first constitution, issued in 604, reads 和を以て貴しと為す, "harmony is to be valued." In plain terms it teaches that to cooperate without quarreling is the most precious thing. The reading would change in meaning, era by era, through the history of wa's transformation. Why did Shotoku Taishi set down such a proposition in a constitution at all?

Why have I looked at the intellectual currents of the Edo period here? Because this movement bears directly on the transformation of wa. Let us look again at 和を以て貴しと為す, "harmony is to be valued," in the Seventeen-Article Constitution, attributed to Shotoku Taishi. It plainly shows Confucian influence. The Analects has the line 禮之用 和爲貴, which on the Japanese side is read as "In the use of ritual, harmony is to be valued." The phrase in the constitution is clearly built on the Analects, and at the same time a fundamental difference between China and Japan comes into view.

Yet many movements also denied Razan's Zhu Xi reading, and the reading changed with each Confucian school. Kokugaku read wa differently as well. It thought of wa as an action and working that existed before it was conceptualized under Chinese influence, and called this yamatogokoro (大和心), "the Japanese heart." Wa was set neither as a Confucian principle of order nor as a Buddhist one, but as a natural, emotional resonance with the climate (fudo) and the gods of the archipelago. The Kokugaku scholars wrote it 大和心, and Norinaga Motoori set it in opposition to karagokoro. In Hirata's day, the next, yamatogokoro began to turn gradually into the wa of the modern theory of the state.

Over decades, this altered concept of wa seeped into the national consciousness, reaching its zenith in the prewar and wartime period. In 1937, the Ministry of Education compiled Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity), which placed immense emphasis on wa as the very core of the Japanese spirit. The text deliberately distinguished "Japanese wa" from the Western individualist concepts of compromise and consensus. Notably, it proclaimed that true wa is "a great harmony wherein each person occupies their allotted station within the whole, preserving absolute unity through actions appropriate to that station." In short, the individual in Japan was not recognized as an autonomous agent, but merely as a cell within the organic whole; genuine harmony was said to exist only when every citizen unquestioningly submitted to their assigned role. Such doctrine had never existed in traditional Japan, yet from that era onward, it hardened into the psychological bedrock of the nation. The Japanese psyche before and after the introduction of this ideology was separated by an unbridgeable chasm.

In postwar Japan, wa was stripped of its overt militarist regalia; it was no longer proclaimed from official podiums as a doctrine of state. Yet its governing impulse — the unbending norm that subordinates the individual to the group, treating anything that disturbs collective unity as an intrinsic evil — only took deeper root. Granted formal democratic rights, people believed they had attained freedom, while in reality an overwhelming compulsion to avoid friction and smooth over difference held them firmly in its grip. The mechanism of control was no longer the heavy-handed force of the police state, but the soft, pervasive pressure of invisible peer surveillance and voluntary self-censorship.